Analysis of Texts in the Field of Education

Abstract

The educational discourse is one of the primary places where numerous dominant ideological premises are established. These discursive constructions are usually not expressed explicitly but are tacit or covered. In other words, ideological premises are not conveyed via ideational (dictionary) meaning of utterances. The analysis therefore has to tackle not the grammatical or logical layer of the text but has to look into the pragmatic aspect of discourse or text in the social communication. In this way, Grice developed his idea of cooperative principle in the analysis of pragmatic rules (maxims) that speakers use in head-to-head interactions to make themselves understood. The violation of those rules usually means that the speaker is making a “conversational” implicature, that is, an implication that cannot be inferred from his spoken contribution but assumes some common knowledge or presupposition. Conversational implicatures are therefore the places where ideological presuppositions can be detected. Grice’s maxims are used in the analysis of two distinct types of texts in the field of education—a regulation on textbook approval and a history textbook. In both texts, Grice’s principles are used to uncover ideological premises.